II—The Golden Age of Navigation

Extract

I went to sail with the Arabs after selling the ship Joseph Conrad, which had proved too expensive for a private citizen to continue to run indefinitely as his own school-ship. I had always wanted to see something of Arab navigation because they were the pioneers. Semitic navigators and mathematicians were among the experts gathered by Prince Henry the Navigator at the school at Sagres, in Portugal, and the dhow voyages of the western Indian Ocean were very old. But I found that today the Arab dhow-captains do not ‘navigate’, as such: they apply personal knowledge to coasting passages, even though the passages cover some thousands of miles. For example, in a big double-ended dhow of the type known as a boom, from Kuwait, I sailed some 8000 miles in about eight months—down the east coast of Africa with the favouring north-east monsoon, as far almost as the monsoon blew, and then back again up the coast in the transitional period between the monsoons.